That no tradition should exist amongst the present race of Indians with respect to these primitive “mound-builders,” is not surprising; nor would this alone indicate any very great antiquity. Mr Wilson thinks the state in which the skeletons were found within the tumuli—crumbling to dust on being touched—is sufficient proof of their great age. One must know all the circumstances of the burial, all the influences to which the skeleton has been exposed, before any safe conclusion can be drawn from this fact. But, leaving undetermined the antiquity of these remains, we think it plain that the first discoverers of them, whether of the mounds or of the ruined cities, have, with the natural enthusiasm pertaining to all discoverers, exaggerated the evidence they display of civilisation, or progress in the arts. After all, the soundest opinion seems to be that the “mound-builders” and the builders of the deserted cities were but the intellectual progenitors of those half-civilised Mexicans and Peruvians whom the Spaniards encountered and destroyed. It is not likely that any higher or equal state of civilisation had been attained and lost before the arrival of the Spaniards. The quite circular form of an extensive mound or earthwork is thought to imply a knowledge of geometry or trigonometry, because a modern surveyor would proceed in a certain scientific manner to lay out such a circle. But the slow process of measuring a number of radii from a given centre, and connecting their terminal points, would probably have sufficed for all that these early geometers executed. Or they might have drawn a smaller circle, in the first instance, by a movable radius, and then traced a larger and a larger one outside of this, till they had obtained one of the requisite magnitude. Time and labour will accomplish much, and with very little help from art or science. But where imagination seems to play the subtlest tricks with our antiquarians is in their appreciation of the beautiful in such relics of the fine arts as are discovered in these mounds and cities. We have prints given us here of carved pipes found in the tombs, which we are told are very beautiful. To our eye they do not look beautiful at all, and very little in advance of other prints which represent pipes carved by the present race of Red Indians. But it is when the antiquarian critic finds himself amongst the remains of the rude sculptures of Central America that he shows himself most under the influence of this _glamour_. If we had not the pictures or engravings by which to check the text, we should think that Thebes and Memphis had been long ago outrivalled on the other side of the Atlantic.